The last temptation of the law

On the second bed sits the middle-aged gharwali — the brothel manager, eating. In the 18-inch space between beds, is a slim girl, near puberty, in a cheap cloth frock. She looks at me wide-eyed, scared, confused. An offering reserved for sexual assault only by men favoured by her enslavers?

Perceptions steam and swirl in my head in those split seconds, assailing my senses. I have a black-out. I sway and grip the shoulder of someone standing next to me. It’s December 1980, in Mumbai’s Kamathipura. My first encounter with the powerfully commercialised denigration of the sexual dimension of human life.

During the next six years, I staggered into similar festering nether regions in Mumbai, Delhi, Agra, Kolhapur, afflicted and scooping up searing tears that scarred spots in my psychic memory. In several State prisons, I met women jailed for prostitution, abandoned by their peers and controllers.

Male and female prostitutes who are in a comfortable social loop, or can afford to be on their own or live in their own premises, constitute a small per cent of the trade. The majority is trapped in brutally organised trade.

The Immoral Traffic Prevention Act takes life from our endorsement of the UN Convention against Trafficking of Persons and the Indian Constitution which denounces subjugation and exploitation of every kind in this country, whether the abused person is a citizen or not.

So what was Maharashtra Governor Mohammed Fazal talking about when he asked Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde to legalise prostitution? Was he defying India’s commitment to the UN? Was he amending the Constitution to sanctify both self-exploitation and organised flesh trade which thrives on psycho-physical-spiritual haemorrhage of sex-servicing men, women and children? Was he discarding Indian laws concerned with savage syndicates ruled by financiers, trappers, traffickers, procurers, pimps and enslavers?

I am responsible for codifying ITPA — thanks to then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, amending the erstwhile Suppression of Immoral Traffic in Women and Girls Act (SITWGA). Then Joint Secretary C P Sujaya had pointedly asked me why I did not criminalise adult individual prostitution. I explained that my value treasure-chest debars self-exploitation and the abusive and always-hazardous selling of human body, which prostitution is. But unless they interfere with community peace and security, I do not want adult individual sexual encounters to come under legal scrutiny; as that would lever police invasion into a variety of relationships. Thus adult individual prostitution with adults is not illegal, unless located in vicinity of specified areas like schools when ‘‘the person with whom prostitution is carried on’’ in public places can be sent to jail for three months.

Clients who rent human units of the organised trade are accountable as abettors. In ITPA, I introduced a number of provisions pertaining to children. I enhanced the punishment, from the earlier maximum two years to life, for induction and exploitation of children in flesh trade, and transferred the burden of proof to the adults. The client hiring a child would face life imprisonment.

Yet, from Day One, ITPA and I have been criticised relentlessly ‘‘for not making the client culpable’’. The caviling symbolises, as does Fazal’s missive, the obtuseness of the discourse on the snarled issue. Amazingly, while incorrectly faulting ITPA for not penalising customers, the critics assert rights of ‘‘commercial sex work’’ — an unconstitutional coinage. Thus, they welcome sex trade and objectification of human bodies.

I do not know how women’s groups who vociferously sought and won a law banning derogation of female bodies in media reconcile with their favoured coinage ‘‘commercial sex worker’’. The remunerative span of the profession is short, so is the servers’ healthy life. I would have preferred to hold customers accountable for harming the health of the hired body, but for the practical difficulties of enforcement. The public focus is on HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. But the seller is susceptible to all contagious diseases — jaundice, meningitis, tuberculosis, viral fevers, eye infections — from the buyers.

A primary argument for legalising prostitution is that it would impose and facilitate compulsory health check-ups of registered or licensed prostitutes. I do not see the logic at all. Firstly, the clients would not face compulsory health check-ups though they infect the bodies they buy, even sometimes leading to impregnation. I suppose the customers will never submit to pre-coitus complete pathological profiling, even if such facility is lodged at the entrance of each flesh trade colony, if not a prostitution house. Nor would any client own up to being responsible for the foetus.

The sex servicers have never been denied access to public and private health services. So why do NGOs want registration? Do they consider it crucial for patients to possess a body-selling licence to get professional medical help? Or is it to enhance their own comfort level that they are dealing with a ‘‘legal’’ prostitute? Would they license sex buyers too and have them carry health certificates? Even if these NGOs provide five-star health facilities to prostitutes and teach them to recognise symptoms of contagious diseases in potential buyers, clients carrying dormant infections would assail their health again in the next few hours.

In fact, registration would hurt those who stray into prostitution temporarily — the non-regular village girls scattered along truckers’ routes and the impoverished girls and women who travel from a distant home to hire a bed in a brothel for an hour if they get a client.

Mindlessly following the UNICEF lead, NGOs designate the children inducted in prostitution as ‘‘child sex workers’’. Would they legalise child prostitution too?